Assistant Professor of Psychology Laura Grafe is among the researchers highlighted in an article on the Simons Foundation website about how neuroscientists are adapting to the COVID-19 pandemic.
From the article:
"Other researchers shifted to projects that could be executed via remote data collection. Laura Grafe, a neuroscientist at Bryn Mawr College, studies the neurobiology of sex differences in stress and sleep in rodents. But it became impossible to do these studies with lab shutdowns. So Grafe shifted her work to humans, administering an online questionnaire to examine how the stress of COVID was affecting sleep. She is now collecting physiological data from Fitbits to help connect the dots between neurobiological mechanisms found in rodents to her new work in humans."
The primary goal of Grafe's research is to better understand how stress affects the brain. She is particularly interested in sex differences in the neurobiological response to stress, and how this may lead to behavioral phenotypes relevant to mental health such as cognitive impairment, sleep deficits, and changes in appetite.